Power Control for Wireless Networks with a Limited Number of Channels

Abstract

In wireless networks, interferences from adjacent nodes that are concurrently transmitting can cause packet reception failures and thus result in significant throughput degradation. The interference can be simply avoided by assigning different orthogonal channel to each interfering node. However, if the number of orthogonal channels is smaller than that of adjacent nodes, this simple channel assignment method does not work. In this paper, we propose a vertex coloring based power control algorithm for wireless networks with a limited number of channels. In order to maintain high data transmission rate between two nodes, the transmission power is increased as long as different orthogonal channel is assigned to each adjacent node. We show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the network throughput performance for various wireless network topologies with different number o f orthogonal channels.